Thor: The Dark World

Kenneth Branagh directed the first Thor and produces this one; the chair passes to Alan Taylor, and the film he has made is louder, faster and funnier than its predecessor and stays in the mind for less time. The story, by Robert Rodat and Don Payne, with a screenplay from Christopher Lee Yost, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, is the old one about a weapon that must not fall into the wrong hands and an ancient enemy who wakes when the stars line up. Thor: The Dark World runs 112 minutes, carries a 12A, and is a decent evening for anyone who liked the first film. It is not much more than that.

Asgard first, because there is a great deal of it. Charles Wood builds the place as a city of gold panels and Viking longships fitted with ray guns, and Kramer Morgenthau lights it like late afternoon in a jeweller’s window. The Dark Elves’ ships are long black blades that hang in the air, and their home world is ash and grey rock, lit like a quarry at dusk. It is all handsome and none of it has weight. Wendy Partridge’s best work is the Dark Elves’ porcelain masks, which are more frightening than the faces they hide.

One of those faces belongs to Christopher Eccleston, who plays Malekith under white prosthetics and speaks a subtitled invented language, and the script gives him a grudge, a weapon and nothing else. He wants the universe dark. We never learn what he would do with it afterwards. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s Kurse, his silent enforcer, comes off better, because a monster that only hits things does not need the lines nobody wrote. Malekith is one of the thinnest villains the Marvel films have produced, and the stakes go down with him.

Tom Hiddleston spends the first half in a glass cell, reading, lounging and insulting his visitors, and he is the only person in the film who appears to be enjoying the material. When the plot lets him out, the film improves at once. His scenes with Chris Hemsworth have an edge the rest lacks: brothers who know each other’s tricks, one of whom keeps changing shape mid-conversation for his own amusement. Hemsworth is looser than he was in 2011 and better for it, and his exasperated face when Loki does something unforgivable is the film’s most reliable joke.

We should say what we felt. For the first forty minutes we were bored, plainly bored, by Asgard: ceremonial rooms, Anthony Hopkins shouting exposition at his son, a war across the realms covered in a montage that looks like a trailer for a better film. Then Rene Russo’s Frigga picks up a sword to defend a guest, and for two minutes the film has a person in it whose danger we cared about. We sat up. That happens perhaps three times in 112 minutes, and each time it is a performer, not a set piece, that does it.

Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster is a scientist for one scene, in a London warehouse where dropped objects do not land, and a parcel for the rest, carried from world to world and set down when the plot needs a reason. Idris Elba stands at the gate and looks into the distance with great dignity. Brian Tyler’s score is brass and choir throughout and never once a tune you could hum in the car park. Wyatt Smith and Dan Lebental cut the London and Asgard threads against each other for the first hour and neither builds; the film keeps leaving a scene just as it gets going.

The last set piece, in Greenwich, is the one people remember, and rightly: the fighters keep dropping through holes between worlds and arriving somewhere else mid-swing, and for ten minutes the film’s cosmology is a joke rather than a lecture. We laughed, and were grateful, and noticed we were laughing at the mechanics rather than at anyone in particular. Most critics have been a little kinder than we are, and the kindness is nearly all for Hiddleston, which we understand. Watch it for him, at home, and have something else ready for the stretches when he is off screen.